The industrial plant was reported destroyed by extensive shelling and resulting fires on the fourth day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

[1] Stalin described the project as "a steel bastion of the collectivisation of agriculture in the Ukraine" and trusted that the workers and the engineering and technical personnel would "overcome the difficulties of the young enterprise" by utilizing the experience of the Stalingrad Works".

Workers were encouraged by the propaganda of the time which praised heroes like the bricklayer Arkady Mikunis who was said to have laid 12,000 bricks in a day in a contrived example of fast work or a young woman, Varva Shmel, who went from being a peasant girl to a mechanic.

The colony suffered acute shortages of food and fuel, but was "divided by a chasm from the ten thousand Russian workers employed".

Meanwhile, the crowds of the hungry and dispossessed who daily besieged the foreign colony were regularly trucked out into countryside and abandoned in deserted villages and on wasteland.

[5] "Engineers" often picked for their political loyalty, would be rushed through their schooling and let loose upon the factory where they would seek to correct the work of the distrusted foreign specialists.

[7] Amongst the accusations made in these cases were various forms of sabotage in the plant including breaking machines, delaying the payment of wages etc.

[3] In 1936, Ordzhonikidzevskyi, the "socialist city" (sotsgorod) that developed around the plant to house its workers, had been named like the factory after Sergo Ordzhonikidze[11] (who died the following year).

[15] In 2016, after the Ukraine government had sold its near-30 percent stake as part of an extensive sell-off of businesses to private enterprise, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said that it had foiled a plot by the management of Deripaska's industrial group to effectively dismantle the Kharkov Tractor Plant,[16] which was then still producing 60 per cent of the tractors sold in Russia.

[17] On the instructions of the Russian owners, the new General Director of the factory, appointed in March 2016, is said to have prepared the foundry equipment, technical and design papers, blueprints, etc.

[16][18][19] The SBU said "implementation of these plans would lead to a complete cessation of the Kharkiv Tractor Plant activities and sabotage of the Ministry of Defense order".

The SBU seized control of the plant's property and accounts, a move that it says prevented the loss of production equipment and unique blueprints and saved nearly a thousand skilled workers from dismissal.

[16] In late April 2016, with the support of Austrian businessman Siegfried Wolf,[20] who had been the nominal owner of the plant under Deripaska's direction,[14] Yaroslavskyi's DCH groups resumed a controlling stake in the company.

[18][21] Among the other assets of DCH (Development Construction Holding) are the Sukha Balka Iron Ore Mine and the Dnieper Metallurgical Combine.

[23] On the 90th anniversary of the Kharkiv Tractor Plant, 1 October 2021, Yaroslavskyi's DCH group announced that its extensive industrial site would be redeveloped as Ukraine's largest technology park, "Ecoplis HTZ".

[25] The construction of what would have been the largest of the new tenants, the automated logistics sorting hub for the national postal operator Ukrposhta, was to have started in March 2022.

[24] Ecopolis HTZ, was the central project of the Kharkiv Development Strategy and of President Volodymyr Zelensky's National Program "Ukrainian Silicon Valley".

[26][27] On 22 March 2022, the Romanian news site Observator reported that KhTZ tractor production is to restart in Halboca, a village near the city of Jassy (Iași) in eastern Romania.

[28] Until the Russian invasion in February 2022, the Kharkiv Tractor Plant was producing machines designed to perform a variety of functions in many industries, agricultural and communal services, construction.